I'm enormously frustrated that Google has been killing off advanced-search tools. The loss of '+' is annoying, particularly since quoted and non-quoted mixture

I'm enormously frustrated that Google has been killing off advanced-search tools. The loss of '+' is annoying, particularly since quoted and non-quoted mixtures are unreliable. Searching on "freebsd" "meltdown" might have solved your problem, but it's too unpredictable to be sure. My experience suggests that Google is doing something with site-level search, such that a site with only 'freebsd' won't appear but a site with 'freebsd' and 'meltdown' on different pages still might. '-', meanwhile, seems to simply be disabled some of the time.